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Linux Business Software Linux

LinuxTag Show Report 55

Posted by michael from the mmmm-linux dept.
BSDTag writes "LinuxTag, Europe's largest Linux show was held in July in Karlsruhe Kongresszentrum, Germany. Nicholas Blachford was there for 3 of those days and he wrote about his experience on OSNews, and provided 6 pages of pictures of the event."
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LinuxTag Show Report More

LinuxTag Show Report

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  • Not a very impressive review (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fefe ( 6964 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @06:07AM (#6594833) Homepage
    So he took a walk around the exhibition area and saw lots of companies. Yes, the exhibition area was surprisingly well populated, but the real meat of the event were the talks (ok, well, maybe I'm biased here because I held one of them).

    By the way, there was at least one other party, from the local Linux User Group, on the second day. I couldn't attend because I was too sleepy.

    The major highlight in my eyes were the GNOME and KDE talks. The GNOME talk was absolutely hilarious, mostly because the demonstrations crashed all the time. There were at least four spontaneously crashing applications in the presentation, the presenter did not even start two things he wanted to show because "they are broken right now" and the multimedia streaming framework "does not compile right now in CVS". So if you ever tried to compile GNOME from the sources: it's not your fault. In comparison, KDE looked like a finished and polished product, although the guy was also using the CVS version and had one problem where one application misbehaved so he restarted it. Anyway, this is a breeze of fresh air in the usual climate of corporate demos where they only show the stuff they know to work reliably. The Linux and Open Source people just proved that they don't do this to bullshit people, they do it for the fun of it!

    By the way: the KDE and GNOME guys used the event to drink some beer together, and they are planning a soccer game (the Debian guys want to be the third team so it can be a tournament). All the talk about animosities is apparently completely unfounded.

    BTW: the entrance fee to LinuxTag was free if you placed a reservation on their web page, and 10 Euros otherwise. So everyone and their kid brother were there, all the talks were packed with people. It was quite an impressive sight. I did the scalable network programming talk, which is a topic that normally wouldn't attract a large audience, and even that talk had over 200 attendees. I found the whole athmosphere there very nice and look forward to the next LinuxTag.

    • Re:Not a very impressive review (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mumblestheclown ( 569987 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @07:04AM (#6594903)
      Anyway, this is a breeze of fresh air in the usual climate of corporate demos where they only show the stuff they know to work reliably.

      I am sure that this would have been your reaction if it had been a microsoft demo that crashed.

      • Re:Not a very impressive review (Score:5, Insightful)

        by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @08:16AM (#6595004)
        Anyway, this is a breeze of fresh air in the usual climate of corporate demos where they only show the stuff they know to work reliably.

        I am sure that this would have been your reaction if it had been a microsoft demo that crashed.

        I think it would have cleared things up for you to read the last sentence in his paragaph:

        The Linux and Open Source people just proved that they don't do this to bullshit people, they do it for the fun of it!

        Microsoft is company trying to make a profit. They have shareholders to answer to. The KDE and GNOME people do not. However, this does not apply solely to Microsoft. If Red Hat or SuSe showed up with anything less then a "Microsoft quality" presentation they would also be quickly lambasted. The core developers (in this case of KDE and GNOME) do this for fun, as the OP pointed out. When an actual business venture is based on the product, however, they must take a more stable and conservative approach. Which is why the major distros don't typically incorporate the latest CVS versions of anything without good cause.

      • ... where they only show the stuff they know to work reliably.

        Which leaves me wondering what Microsoft show when they have corporate demos?

      • Well, I think a crash is very much justified if it is a CVS version that crashes... even for a gazillion $ company.
    • In fact, on the third page, he talks about the presentations, saying that:

      Many of these talks looked interesting but unfortunately for me many of them were in German and given that my German language skills consist of "Ein Bier" they weren't of much interest after all. In addition to the main talks there were also some side events such as one on Friday which was talks and workshops devoted to Debian. I did manage to get along to a couple of the talks though:

      Those talks being "Commercial Involvement in

    • Are there slides for your talk anywhere?

  • Attention GNU thieves! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 02, 2003 @06:12AM (#6594840)
    Stop stealing SCO code, you fat, smelly, greasy Linux hippies! There's no WAY you could write something as decent as SCO Unix without stealing from us. ...sincerely, SCO Management

  • The HP stand looked good (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 02, 2003 @06:24AM (#6594858)
    Yeah, right. As if that's what he was looking [blachford.info] at. Sure, anything you say.
  • that this guys chief writing influences seem to be Dr. Seuss books? Not to mention the really bad puns. [osnews.com] Nice coverage of the show in my eyes though, as I've never been to any type of tech convention and it was cool to see what happens when nerds congregate.
    • The guy probably doesn't have very good english, give him a break.

      I thought the 'review' was pretty intersting, as someone who missed out on going last year the pictures give a good idea of what goes on.
      Still, could have done with some commentary on the talks I suppose.

  • PHP and Friends @ LinuxTag (Score:4, Informative)

    by g_dancer ( 308076 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @06:56AM (#6594894) Homepage
    Coverage of the "PHP and Friends @ LinuxTag" effort can be found here [sebastian-bergmann.de].

  • ObJoke (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The SCO stall was packed full I guess? :-)

  • Author has a sense of humour (Score:4, Funny)

    by arcanumas ( 646807 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @07:27AM (#6594935) Homepage
    Good to see the author has a nice sense of humour.
    From the article:
    MySQL had a small stand where they no doubt people queried them using a structured language.

    Oh, and 'm not a native English speaker but isn't this bad english?

    • Yes, it is bad English and bad slashdot. It should read something like:

      MySQL had a small stand where no doubt people asked questions in a structured query language that was not 100% ANSI SQL compatible while the true believers in PostgreSQL stood by hurling fecal matter and shouting through bullhorns that MySQL was a vastly inferior product.

  • I want one of those MP3 servers. :-)
  • So say someone was gonna goto next years event, does anyone who was there this year have any good tips? What to expect, where to stay, drink, etc...
    • So say someone was gonna goto next years event, does anyone who was there this year have any good tips? What to expect, where to stay, drink, etc...

      There is no such thing as a bad place to drink in Germany.

  • Soekris hardware (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The 486 machine mentioned in the article is a Soekris 4501 [kd85.com]

  • Smart Tags in the article (or is it me?) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by abelikoff ( 412709 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @12:29PM (#6595698) Homepage
    I've been reading it in IE 6 and it shows a lot of smart tags in the article (my favorite one is a tag placed on every 'Linux' or 'open source' occurence prompting for free trial of VS.NET 2003). Is it me (XP+IE) or is it OSNews?

  • Interesting reference to the churches (Score:3, Interesting)

    by panurge ( 573432 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @01:02PM (#6595787)
    Churches need infrastructure and that infrastructure could well be Linux.

    Three years ago I discovered that our local charity had just spent badly needed funding on installing Novell on the server (actually a good choice in the circumstances) and NT4 on all their workstations. They felt they had no choice because all their workers needed access to the finance system. Although they got education discount for Windows, it was still a significant slice of budget.

    It's now 3 years later. Is it possible to run mainstream integrated accounts suites like Peachtree, Sage or MYOB on Linux? Because, if so, that could be the killer app for small charities and churches. OO/SO is now beginning to get really good application integration (I really think I can recommend SO6.1 to businesses when it's released).

  • Did they break out into German Techno dancing like on Sprockets ??

  • The girls (Score:3, Interesting)

    by terminal.dk ( 102718 ) on Saturday August 02, 2003 @05:30PM (#6596716) Homepage
    How can he be surprised about the girls ?

    There are plenty of girls and women in Europe, who are not kept locked away in the bedroom and kitchen. No matter what you do, there are always some, no matter if it is skydiving, diving, or computer parties (ok, computer parties might have the lowest amount of women).

    Teach american women to be more independent :)
  • Do the coordinators yell, "Ollie-ollie-outs-n-free!"?

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